The trouble is the liquid stuff turns into a kind of fog. When you shoot a normal man in an atmosphere, or in space, his guts don’t turn into a cloud of mist that clings to everything. But as the saying goes, beggars can’t be choosers. I was in this, and there was no easy way out.
“I’ve got humanoids in diving gear coming at me. Zillions of them!”
“What are they, Centurion? We can’t identify the enemy.”
Ignoring the question, I kept spamming bolts downrange. The approaching figures returned fire with something lighter—snap-rifles?
“They might be humans,” I said. “They’ve got snap-rifles.”
“Identify your attackers, McGill.” This last order came from a new voice. It was Graves. He must have gotten a heads-up from the techs that something big was going down. “That’s an order.”
“Uh… I’m kind of busy, sir.”
“Identify them. If you die before you report, this whole scouting mission will have been in vain.”
I could kind of see his point, but I just wasn’t in the mood. I was shuffling backwards up the slope, firing frequently into the cloud of blood. Every now and then an outstretched hand or a foot came close, but then I fired again and the man went down wriggling. Sometimes, they slipped outside the protective region of the pathway. Once they put a single foot past those shiny rails, they were crushed and killed faster than anything I could do to them.
Their snap-rifle shots were striking me all the while, but their penetrating power was vastly reduced by the water. Even low-density water was thicker than air. Inside my armor, I rocked this way and that as they dented up my chest plate. Now and then I felt a good hit and grunted, but I kept on fighting.
“McGill, damn you, stop trying so hard to survive. I order you to rip the facemask off one of those frigging troops.”
I must have killed thirty of the enemy, but they kept on coming. Sighing, I took a step downhill and drew my combat knife. My morph-rifle was about out of juice, anyway.
The next man came out of that dark cloud of gore, and he came at me with a knife of his own. Fortunately, I’m well-trained and practiced with a wide variety of weaponry. I slid past his blade and planted mine in his throat. Then, with a deft twist I sawed at his neck, and his whole head came free.
Shuffling back again, I dodged several more reaching, claw-like hands. When I was able, I looked down at the trophy in my fist.
“It’s… it’s a dogman. One of those freaks that the Claver’s cooked up. The guys who captured me when I first got here.”
“I see that. Good work. You can die now. Graves out.”
Knife-work. That’s what it was all down to now. My rifle was dry.
I tried hard to kill them all. I figured that maybe, just maybe, there was a single unit of them. About a hundred troops coming up my way.
They had several disadvantages. For one thing, I’d killed at least twenty already. For another, they were walking uphill. The last element was the most important, however: they were stuck in that sick cloud of misty gore.
I kept shuffling back, staying out of the cloud. They were forced to rush forward, blinded, coming at me one or two at a time. If it hadn’t been for the shiny railway lines at our feet, they could have flanked me and killed me easily. But as it was, their attack was channeled. They could only face me as they reached me—and I’m pretty good with a knife. To the best of my knowledge, only one man was better—Harris.
The fight was long and grim. A dogman would come up to me, take a poke, and get jocked. Sometimes, I would grab his arm and push him out past the barrier, where he was immediately crushed by the ocean. Other times, I would chop off his hand at the wrist, or fake him out with a feint at the face, and then stick him in the guts.
Sometimes they shot me. I had leaks in my suit, and some of my limbs were beginning to go numb. That was from my armor automatically shutting down compromised regions to prevent me from bleeding out.
I didn’t care. I just kept fighting them. There wasn’t anything else to do, and if you want to take down a Varus man with damn-near thirty years of experience in the legions, well sir, you’d better mean business.
In the end, I caught a glimpse of flashing lights behind me.
That was it, then. They’d somehow gotten the high ground. Maybe there was another path. Or maybe we were shallow enough that a man could safely walk through the barrier and survive.
I was pretty near exhausted, and I almost didn’t care. But that was a quitter’s attitude. I didn’t let myself go down. Graves wouldn’t have, I told myself. Not until he was dragged down and killed by this endless mob.
So, I dispatched another hapless dogman by kicking out with my size thirteen boot. I hit him in the chest and sent him into the next man, who was so freaked out by the overload of death that he gutted his friend before he recognized who was suddenly in his face.
In that single moment of confusion, I dared to turn and look upslope. How many of them were behind me? How close were they?
What I saw through my stained and scarred faceplate surprised me. A single figure approached at a jogging pace. His suit lights were bright, and they were set in a familiar pattern. The man—the shape of him. It had to be a human.
Suddenly, I knew.
“Carlos?”
“I’m
